Regulation of remuneration of insolvency practitioners in the Czech Republic and in some other countries

The dissertation deals with the legal regulation of the remuneration of the profession of insolvency practitioner for the function performance in insolvency proceedings. The insolvency practitioner is a unique subject of insolvency proceedings which does a number of tasks of a supervisory, control and executive nature within various methods of bankruptcy resolution. In the introduction, the dissertation aims to draft the first comprehensive paper on the theory and practice of remuneration of insolvency practitioners in the Czech Republic and to analyse in detail the historical and existing legislation. For the purposes of her research, the author sets out four hypotheses supplemented by partial research questions, the confirmation or refutation of which she evaluates at the end of the thesis. The introductory chapters summarize the current state of knowledge and the availability of specialized literature. The author describes the historical development of the legal regulation of the remuneration of practitioners´ professions in liquidation and settlement proceedings and monitors legislative trends. While liquidations have historically been dominated by performance models given by the share of the proceeds of monetization, in the course of remedial procedures a number of different models have alternated over time. The fourth and most extensive chapter deals with the central topic of the dissertation, which is the analysis of the Czech legislation on the remuneration of insolvency practitioners. While the third chapter introduces the reader to the issue of the procedural position of the insolvency practitioner, the procedures of administration of individual methods of bankruptcy and the resulting characteristic tasks, the fourth chapter follows it with a detailed analysis of key aspects of remuneration for performing assigned tasks. The author continuously presents the results of her analysis of the case law of courts conducted on a large sample of cases. He tests the research questions on the results of a quantitative study dealing with the remuneration of insolvency practitioners in the phenomenon of joint-spouses discharge from debt. The fifth chapter offers a comparison of legal regulations of selected foreign jurisdictions (Germany, the Netherlands and Austria), in which the author demonstrates diametrically different approaches to solving the chosen topic and compares the amount of remuneration in comparable procedural scenarios. In the sixth chapter, the author formulates her legislative recommendations resulting from the identified shortcomings of the current situation in the form of de lege ferenda considerations. At the end of the dissertation, the author summarizes the most important results of her research. In particular, this is a worrying tendency for different courts to reach diametrically different conclusions and persistent gaps in legislation caused by insufficient synchronization of amendments to the Insolvency Act and Decree No. 313/2007 Coll.